Hi there,
A client has asked whether or not I can provide some support for his intranet which runs on Oracle Application Server Portal. Not having used this technology before I thought I'd ask if anyone else has and what they thought of developing for it.
I'm a c#/ASP.NET developer so I note with apprehension that there's no mention of .NET in the developers guide. Anyone tried to make the two work together and lived to tell the tale?
The only experience I've had with an Oracle Portal was obliquely, when I inherited a system that used one for a relatively simple maintenance web application. A large part of my opinion of Oracle's stuff comes from my background with SQL Server/ASP.NET, but Oracle is just plain harder to set up and administer and keep running, and that applies not just to the database but also to auxiliary stuff like Oracle Portal, their SOA suite, their Mobility Server etc. Even experienced Oracle people tend to agree with this, so hopefully I won't piss anyone off.
I would definitely not provide support for an Oracle Portal application (or any other Oracle product, for that matter) unless I had a lot of experience with the tools.
Oracle Portal was never meant to be a "platform," but instead to fulfull a specific need. When Portal was not the right solution directly, the pointer was to JDev and BC4J, plus needed other stuff. I have done extensive Oracle Portal development and for what it is, it did just fine (i.e. a "portal" to core data and applications with some exposure of that data via the portal).
The current direction of the portal product is to separate it out and have it under Oracle's "Web Center." The focus here is to make the development of portlets closer and closer to standard java development. You can find the official statement here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdf/oracle_portal_sod_r11.pdf
Web Center is much more of a "platform" that has all the buzz words around the 2.0 technologies. Including content mgmt, portal, and a .NET WSRP integration feature/function. I would check that out in addition to portal (which does quick and easy portlets for web center too).
My company (a dedicated Oracle shop) and I have used Oracle Portal for many years and have been very successful with it. But I have to warn you against taking on this task if you do not have experience with PL/SQL (Oracle's proprietary database programming language).
An intranet built on Oracle Portal is likely to make extensive use of custom-built "portlets". You can build these in Java or PL/SQL; in my experience, 95% of all real-life portlets are built using PL/SQL.
Theoretically, if you use the latest version of Oracle Portal (10.1.4), you can consume WSRP 1.0 portlets. So if you can build portlets in .NET that will communicate using WSRP 1.0, you could integrate these. But if your customer asks for "support", they probably expect you to be able to tweak their existing portlets - and that would require PL/SQL programming experience.
There's a fairly good description of Oracle Portal on the Oracle Wiki: http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+Portal
Strategically, Oracle has placed Oracle Portal is in the "Continue & Converge" category, which means that it's supported and will receive minor updates. Their strategic portal product these days is Oracle WebCenter, but that's a $125,000 per CPU behemoth; it's likely to be overkill for 99% of all sites built on Oracle Portal.
I have developed a dozen or so Java portlets for Oracle Portal over the past few years. If you are not necessarily tied into using .NET to develop portlets and do not want to use PL/SQL, I would recommend this approach. Oracle's Portlet Developer Kit (PDK) offers good functionality (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdk.html).
I've not tried the WSRP approach but have deployed ASP.NET apps using the Web Clipping Portlet that comes with Oracle Portal with some success.
I have found Portal to be difficult to work with at times and a good knowledge of the other components in the Application Server stack (OID, SSO, Oracle DB, etc) is very helpful.
I recommend that you take a look at Oracle's WebCenter 11g Suite. When Oracle acquired BEA, it took on a few portal products, but from everything I've heard, WebCenter 11g is Oracle's story as far as portals go for the future - all the active development will be concentrated there. You can find a decent amount of material out there. Here's a blog post to get you started on WebCenter 11g.